Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Rule
of the People or of Majorities

We
say two things about democracy. Both of them are sort of true. But it
is easy to see that they cannot be true at the same time. And that
creates a problem for our understanding of what democracy is.

The
first thing we say is that in a democracy the people rule. To be
sure, we do not govern. We do not issue executive orders, issue
driver's licenses, or building permits. The government does that. But
we always have a supervisory role because we elect representatives to
the legislature and we elect the head of the Executive, the
president. Persons to fill many other important jobs in the executive
must be approved by the elected representatives. All of this is
familiar.

We
also say that our democracy is an electoral system where there are
periodic votes, with every vote having the same weight and getting
counted only once. Votes are secret so that no one is exposed to
political pressure for the vote they cast. When not everyone casts
votes for the same candidate, for instance, the majority wins. Where
two or more candidates compete the one who has more votes gets
elected.

The
people who vote for the majority, whose candidate gets elected
thereby gain some influence over the next government and thus may be
said to rule.

But
what about the minority? What about the people who work really hard
for their candidate who is, for whatever reason, less popular and
does not win? They have no influence over the government. They have
no influence at all. They cannot really be said to rule.

Here
is our problem then. When we practice electoral democracy with
majority rule only the winners of elections maybe said to rule and
the other people do not. When we say that democracy consists of an
electoral system with majority rule, we seem to contradict the other
thing we say, namely that in a democracy, the people—meaning all
the people—rule.

Many
people are fully aware of the tension between the different ways in
which we describe democracy. If it were easier for us to come to
agreement on different things or on who is the best candidate for a
particular job, obviously this would not be a problem. The people
would make their choices by "consensus" as it is called.
They would discuss a matter, consider alternative proposals for
resolving an existing problem and then figure out the best resolution
of the problem and adopt that. Once everyone agreed, the only thing
remaining to do would be to execute the policy agreed on.

That
scenario
would
obviously be lovely but it is, in our world quite unrealistic. In
almost any situation we
are unable to reach agreement. To
this many
people say: “Yes,
majority rule is a second best arrangement but it's really not so
bad.” Electoral
systemswith
majority ruleare
widely accepted as an acceptable form of democracy.

But
to do so is a mistake.Decisions
are made only by a portionof
the citizenry. The minority has nothing to say and
it
is not
accidental
who belongs to the winning majority.The
people who can pay for expensive lobbyists,who can afford to
hirehigh-class
advertising agenciesto
promote their perspectives win most elections; the peoplewho
are poor,who
work more than one joband
therefore have no timetoagitate
on behalf of their points of view usually lose.Electoral
systems with majority ruleare
not democratic.They
produce oligarchies,
the rule ofmere
portions of the population,of
the wealthy, the owners, the employers.

The
defenders of electoral democracy will argue that we have no
choice because people just cannot agree and therefore we need to
fall back on majority rule. But this defense of majority
rule completely ignores the fact that
there are a whole lot of trained and highly skilled people in our
country at this time and, in fact, all over the world who know how to
get people who have different perspectives on something to agree in
spite of their differences, but many of these people make their
living helping different groups to overcome serious disagreements and
forging agreements that everyone is pretty happy with.

This
sort of technique is
called
alternative dispute resolution (ADR).
Thousands of practitioners of ADR all over the world have training
institutes, trainings and conferences. They have different domestic
and international organizations that accredit practitioners. Their
members write many books and pamphlets. The different versions and
techniques and theories of ADR are readily available to anybody who
wants to know anything about it.

ADR
differs from the typical
political.
In ordinary political conversations people debate with each other and
are at pains to win and to show that the other is mistaken.
Businesses
cannot afford to waste time on debates that do not reach a speedy and
mutually acceptable agreement. In
the business world, the conversations between groups of people who
disagree are often facilitated by trained experts. These experts
learn to remain neutral. They do not take sides. Their only interest
is in getting the conflicting parties to come to some desired
agreement, be that about a policy, or about the possible candidate
for an important position, or about some more general principles of
politics. The facilitators have many tasks. Often political debates
go round and round because people misunderstand each other. A
facilitated debate will make quite clear what they
disagree on.

In
a political debate each side is wedded to their particular
proposal; in
contrast,
facilitators will encourage parties to be creative and find new
solutions that both parties might accept gladly. Political debates
are often hard to close because the parties make assumptions that
they have not really examined or fact-checked. Facilitators will
probe gently to encourage each party to examine any
unexamined
assumptions. That process
will often
open up new conversations.

Using
such techniques, facilitators, mediators and others resolve problems
every
day --often problems that have festered and have created serious
hostilities. Testimonials to that accomplishment come from large
corporations, important law firms, and other powerful
people
whom we can trust not to spend money for help with their
disagreements unless that help is indubitably worth its price.

If
we applied
these techniques to our political disagreements many of those would
disappear and our decisions
would more often be
based on consensus
and not exclude electoral minorities from ruling. Using
the skills of various professionals in facilitating agreement and
consensus, we
would be able to
turn our back on the injustice of majority rule. Using the techniques
of facilitation and mediation, democracy resting on consensus may
well be possible.

“But
this will take too long” the
defenders of majority rule will tell us. However,
the reality is
that mediation and facilitation have not so far being used to any
extent to settle political disagreements. We do not
know how difficult or
time-consuming it would
be to apply these techniques in politics. A lot of
experimentation will be needed before we are in a position to
have reliable opinions on the feasibility of resting
consensus democracy on mediation and facilitation techniques. The
encouraging results in various business situations should
encourage us to engage in that kind of experimentation.

We
do not know today how well a mediated and facilitated democracy would
function. But we do know that it is a real alternative to our
present. The insistence that majority rule is the optimal
procedure is clearly mistaken, given the positive
experiences many enterprises are having with mediation and
facilitation. Electoral techniques and majority rule or
not unavoidable. Using
electoral systems and majority rule is a choice we make. It
is, as we saw above, a choice of oligarchy
over genuine democracy.

The
dogma of the inevitability of majority rule is being promoted by
the winners in existing oligarchies. It is in their interest to
make everyone believe that there
are no other options. But there are.
We should take back our democracy by trying large-scale
experiments with mediated and facilitated democratic
conversations.